Hardly earth-shattering - 13 October 2011 |
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A friend recently lent me Llewelyn Powys’s The Pathetic Fallacy, along with a few other documents reflecting his atheist convictions – especially about the resurrection of Jesus. Here are a few of the highlights, together with some responses.
1. “There is not, as far as I am aware, one single piece of incontrovertible, undeniable, cast-iron evidence for God’s existence. And if, as believers will no doubt maintain, there is, why is it not as clear as daylight to us all?” (H. M. Keegan, Published letter)
- What kind of “evidence” could in principle exist which would compel belief in the existence of a Supreme Being without at the same time relegating that Being to a lesser status – dependent upon, and subject to, Something Else (namely “evidence”) for its own epistemic verification? The demand for such evidence is itself a demand that the Supreme Being should not exist, and therefore closes the discussion even in the very act of opening it.
- Truth apparent to all, but suppressed by all (Ps 19; Rom 1 etc.)
2. “We don’t need God to give.” Atheists do good things (like giving to charity, though unlike Christians they don’t tend to make a song and dance about their atheist convictions in the process); and Theists do bad things (like persecuting heretics and waging unjust wars).
- So, Christians sometimes do bad things, and atheists sometimes do good things. Yup. And vice versa. So we’re unlikely to move towards religious certainty merely by comparing levels of charitable giving within different sections of the community. We’re going to need to think about some arguments.
- At some point, both the Christian and the unbeliever is going to need to find grounds for the category “good” on which this evaluation implicitly relies. That could be an interesting discussion.
3. Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy, ch. 1: “The Origin of all religions.”
- We need to “bear in mind the ultimate origin of such psychic manifestations” as Christianity, which have all “sprung from the shuddering of the living human spirit in the face of the Infinite” (p. 1). Says who? Powys brings to the very first sentence of his book a preconceived and unargued view of the nature, not merely of Christianity, but of all religions.
- In so-doing, Powys misses perhaps the most obvious feature of the Christian Scriptures: they are not (merely, or even at all) a philosophy, but an interpreted history. Events, my dear boy, events, as Harold Macmillan would probably have said.
4. Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy, ch. 2: “The Hebrew root of Christianity.”
- The Jews “converted the Yahweh of Sinai into a universal ruler” (p. 4). Under pressure of political oppression, the OT messianic expectations were misunderstood and (often) politicised.
- Standard history-of-religions stuff, and subject to all the usual criticisms.
- What’s wrong with political liberation? And even if the OT had been misunderstood by some, does it follow that there’s no truth in it. 1000 years ago people misunderstood headaches, but paracetamol still works for me.
5. Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy, ch. 3: “Jesus of Nazareth.”
- Powys seems to know a great deal about Jesus (pp. 10ff.). A pretty imaginative re-telling of the life of a C1 Palestinian carpenter with a thoughtful bent. And such detail – where’s he getting this stuff from? Don’t know – Powys doesn’t say.
- “From the beginning Christianity has been perverted” (p. 22). Yup. So?
- Some extraordinary claims: Jesus “had no wide vision of life”; “He interpreted the human situation from within the narrow confines of Palestine”; Ordinary values … never influenced him” (p. 19). What kind of evidence would Powys need to adduce to substantiate all this? Perhaps he thinks it’s just all obvious because it seems reasonable to him, and because (unlike the Gospel accounts) no miracles are involved. Unvarnished modernism read back into the biblical histories.
6. Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy, ch. 4: “The legend of the resurrection.”
- “With the knowledge we have won in recent years we are safe in asserting that no man has ever rised out of the grave” (p. 27). Assertion, not argument. Begs the question at the outset, without the slightest attempt to ask the obvious questions. Of course the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is extraordinary. And obviously if we approach the resurrection accounts with materialism firmly embedded, we will be compelled to deny them. But such a denial is already contained within the assumptions; we have not, strictly speaking, thought at all.
- “The accounts we have of [the resurrection] were written down long after the event” (p. 27). No discussion of oral traditions, other comparable historical data, etc. Shame.
- “After the crucifixion … his disciples were scattered” (pp. 28-29). Yup, true enough. What can explain their survival as a distinct religious community? Powys tells us: they imagined that they had seen him (on the Emmaus Road, or by the lake, or in the locked room), and “as the years passed, these simple imaginings becamme more and more circumstantial” (pp. 30-31). Finally, “as demands for a valid evidence increased, these half-forgotted impressions were written down as facts” (p. 31). Right. And in the meantime, a few weeks and months after the crucifixion, numerous hard-headed yet despondent men had been so transformed that they were willing to take a beating and see their friends and families arrested, imprisoned and scattered from their homes for proclaiming what were, at that time, “simple imaginings”.
7. Powys, The Pathetic Fallacy, ch. 5: “Saint Paul.”
- Paul “took the religion of the early Christians with their simple faith in the Messiah and lifted it into the realm of high mystical import” (p. 38). Little evidence here, unfortunately, that the author has grasped the relationship between Jesus proclamation of the Kingdom of God (and that He, Jesus, is the anointed King) and Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel (God’s declaration that Jesus is the King). that might help to iron out some of his confusion.
- “There early Christians were taught to believe in the speedy coming of Jesus” (p. 41). No they weren’t. The “coming soon” texts refer to Jesus “coming” in judgment on apostate Jerusalem in AD 70.
8. Other thoughts.
- More post-biblical stuff. That can wait for another time. Nothing earth-shattering.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Minister's Blog